NEXO STM Turns Up The Heat On Chesney Tour

Kenny Chesney has always brought country’s brightest lights to America, and this summer

he’s tapped quadruple 2013 Academy of Country Music nominee, Kacey Musgraves, and 2012 ACM Single of the Year winner and multiple 2013 ACM nominee, The Eli Young Band, to open on many of his ‘No Shoes Nation’ tour stops. Country Music Association 2012 Album of the Year Winner and ACM nominee leader, Eric Church, has also taken the stage on 16 of the 19 stadium dates, while triple Grammy-winner and multiple ACM nominee, Zac Brown Band, joined for three stadium shows including a co-headline show in their hometown of Atlanta. The tour is in support of Chesney’s latest CD “Life on a Rock.”

The 46-date tour, which began March 16 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, has made a major change to its stadium line array. Morris Light & Sound (Nashville) has provided a new NEXO STM line array for the 2013-2014 tour. The system layout is configured with 74 M46 for mains, 74 b112 bass extensions, 48 s118 flown subs, 16 RS18 ground ray subs, 12 PS10s for front fills, 14 GEO S 1210s and two GEO S1230s, 22 NUAR amp racks, and two Yamaha DME 64 digital mix engines with LAKE Mesa EQ cards for system tuning and console switching.

At an early stop at Cowboy Stadium, the 45,000+ concertgoers were treated to improved sound at the venue when the STM rig arrived for the Chesney show. The in-house audio crew was extremely impressed by the NEXO system.Morris Light & Sound was involved early in the development process of the new NEXO System. “We were involved with the STM system for about a year before the system launched,” states John Mills, Morris VP and systems engineer for the Chesney tour. “Since we were the first company with a system of this size, Chris Rabold (Chesney FOH engineer) and I provided NEXO with tons of input on how it was performing and what we were doing with it from a tuning perspective.”

Mills said, “We had at least one programmer and one system specialist with us for the first few weeks of rehearsals and shows. Beyond that, we sent them our tuning files and SMAART measurements and they incorporated our preferences into a new preset. Since then we honestly do very little to the PA each day. From stadium to shed, 70,000 seats to 10,000 seats, our tuning is almost always the same. The consistency and accuracy of the PA is like none I have ever tech’ed. From what my NS1 model predicts to what we measure is really the best software/hardware/measurement relationship I have ever experienced. It really makes my job as a system engineer easier because it is so accurate.”

The NEXO STM Series (Scale Through Modularity) loudspeaker cabinets are the first of its kind on the market. Ideal for touring, festivals, and sound company rental, the new system combines the best of Alpha functionality with the technical innovation of NEXO’s patented Hyperbolic Reflector and venting design in which all radiating surfaces are in phase, delivering a powerful, flexible, and easy to use system. STM enables line array systems to scale up or down depending on event audience size, from 1,000 to 100,000 people.